10.13.2006

time


my time has been colonized by school, and work,
but tonight, I made soup and salve.
I jarred the dill I'd been drying, and brought in rosehips.
I laid the plants-in-their-pots along the counter.
I took some time to attend to the physical.

It is almost a rebellion in some ways, it is 'luxurious' time, a priviledge of the wealthy nations, and the knowledge that my life is imbricated with the political, collective, spiritual and all that.

Our daily acts, how we spend our time, our praxis are the core of meaning on many levels, discursive and ontological. Foucault saw power as a microprocess; people become subjects through their daily acts. "Acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core of substance".

Judith Butler a couple of decades later included gender as the foundation of identity: "Gender is the repeared stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts with in a highly rigid regulatory frome that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being" (p.33).

We are disciplined and created as subjects of the state through "the organization and refulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped", we are made legible. This is Susan Bordo's brief of Foucault's description on how the 'docile body' is produced.

She explores how to leave room for rebellions. "And, third, we need a discourse that will enable us to account for the subversion of potential rebellion, a discouse that, while insisting on the necessity of objective analysis of power relation, social heirarachy, political backlash, and so forth, will nonetheless allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject at times becomes enmeshed in collusion witht foreces thtat sustain her own oppression."


How I am spending my time these days..